Friday, August 21, 2015

Reading Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales (Lo Cunto de li Cunti, or alternately,
the Pentamerone), I wondered at the
evolution of “fairy-tale” as an adjective – as in fairy-tale castle, fairy-tale
romance, fairy-tale wedding. How, given Basile’s collection of exceedingly bizarre
tales – what translator Nancy Canepa calls “the first integral collection of
authored, literary fairy tales in western Europe” – could the term ever have
gained such airy, pleasant connotations? Perhaps it was through reaction and flight
from the raw, grim, joyful, mercurially dramatic cornucopia of weirdness that
makes up The Tale of Tales.

Basile’s collection came to my attention while I was exploring
Teofilo Folengo’sBaldo, an influence on Basile’s work. Through these
tales, written in Neapolitan, Basile aligns himself with the vernacular, sardonic
tradition of Folengo and, before him, Boccaccio. I hardly expected anything as
rewarding as Baldo’s baroquely delirious, macaronic burlesque, but The
Tale of Tales, which appeared in five volumes between 1634 and 1636, proved
perhaps even more entertaining. Variations of some of the tales will be
familiar already to readers. They include the first recorded version of
“Cinderella” as well as other stories later filtered through Charles Perrault,
the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen to emerge as “Sleeping Beauty,” “Puss
in Boots,” “Rapunzel,” and “The Golden Goose,” to name a few. The richness of
Basile’s stories – their unrestrained, frequently gruesome queerness; imaginative
and bewitching metaphorical language; and local color, rooted right down to the
fennel in Neapolitan specifics – makes them something quite apart from the
later stories they inspired.

As Canepa says in her introduction,

The stories of The Tale of Tales are
like no other fairy tales; imbued just as much with the formulas of elite
literary culture as with those of folkloric traditions and orality; closer to
Rabelais and Shakespeare (Basile has been called a Mediterranean Shakespeare)
than to most other fabulists; bawdy and irreverent but also tender and
whimsical; acute in psychological characterization and at the same time
encyclopedic in description; full, ultimately, of irregularities and loose ends
that somewhat magically manage to merge into a splendid portrait of creatures
engaged in the grave and laborious, gratifying and joyful businessof learning to live in their world – and to
tell about it. And reading Basile’s text is an experience like no other, a
roller-coaster ride in which the reader glides along smoothly for only brief
stretches of what is, overall, a decidedly vertiginous experience.

Containing this “vertiginous experience” is an almost
geometrically rigid and simple structure. Basile’s tales nest within an
overarching, framing “tale of tales.” Lucia, the evil wife of a handsome
prince, Tadeo, has threatened to kill the child she carries unless Tadeo will
satisfy her desperate need to hear stories, a desire implanted in her by a
fairy intent on aiding the honest Zoza, from whom Lucia stole the vessel full
of tears Zoza had shed in order to awaken Tadeo from death and thus become his
betrothed. Responding to Lucia’s threats, Tadeo calls on women from across the
land to come to the palace to tell stories. From the multitudes who respond,
Tadeo picks the ten best, and, over five days, each recounts a story a day. Interspersed
between each day’s ten tales are eclogues in the form of dialogues between
members of the court. Finally, a concluding chapter resolves the conflict of the
opening tale, restoring Zoza to her rightful place by the prince’s side and sending
the malevolent Lucia to an especially cruel fate.

Scarcely into the first story, one realizes that Basile’s
collection, despite its guileless subtitle, “Entertainment for Little Ones,” is
most likely aimed at adults. Holding nothing back, they are filled with not
only curious quests and magical transformations, but also violence and
brutality, scatological content, blistering insults, wretched punishments and
acts of revenge, and an abundance of sexual matters, usually couched in wildly inventive,
entertaining metaphorical language. But as in Baldo, the sheer delirious
joy in such language excuses all. As Tadeo announces at the beginning of the
tales,

There is nothing in the world more
delicious, my illustrious women, than to hear about the doings of others, nor
without obvious reason did that great philosopher set the supreme happiness of
man in hearing pleasant tales; since when you lend an ear to tasty items, cares evaporate, irksome thoughts are dispelled, and life is prolonged.

Interwoven into these “pleasant tales” is a riotous compendium
of the bizarre, loathsome, and wondrous: a woman who, instead of having“a little fart” of a child, gives birth to a
branch of myrtle; a young girl who creates her spouse out of almond paste, rose
water and precious gems; a live goose used as toilet paper; a virgin who eats a
sea dragon’s heart in order to become pregnant; an envious girl who has herself
skinned by a barber as she’s been tricked into believing this is how to become
beautiful; a donkey that shits “a superb diarrhea” of “pearls, rubies, emeralds,
sapphires, and diamonds, each as big as a walnut”; as in Baldo, a whale
mistaken for an island and containing in its belly “splendid countrysides,
breathtaking gardens,” and subterranean chambers (the ubiquity of this conceit
in Italian literature might make for an interesting dissertation); and a tale
in which, in putting one’s ear to the earth, it’s possible to hear all the
intrigues of the world.

“The Cinderella Cat” – Basile’s version of Cinderella – is a
concrete example of how Basile’s tales differ from the familiar elements of later
iterations. For example, the tale begins with Zezolla – a.k.a. Cinderella Cat -
murdering her stepmother by slamming the lid of a chest down on her neck. The place
of the fairy-godmother is taken by a fairy who emerges from a date tree whenever
Zezolla sings a particular song. Above all, the language is hardly what parents
(some parents, anyway) might feel comfortable reading to their children:

Zezolla returned to the date tree and
repeated the enchanted song, at which she was magnificently dressed and placed
in a golden coach accompanied by so many servants that she looked like a whore
arrested in the public promenade and surrounded by police agents.

As in this case, Basile’s metaphorical language shares with
Folengo’s a palpable distaste for authority. References to police and other guardians
of the law proliferate; in one tale, a character snaps at another’s timidity by
exclaiming, “If you’re afraid, you should become a cop!”

But the language of The Tale of Tales is of a
stunning metaphorical ingenuity and diversity. Canepa calls attention in her
introduction to Basile’s plethora of metaphors related to the cycle of day and
night, so striking that the reader can scarcely avoid noting them as one of the
work’s most prominent features:

Dawn brought the news that the Sun had
been found alive, and the sky shed its mourning clothes…Night’s shadows, chased
by the Sun’s cops, were evicted from the town…the Sun lifted high the trophies
of light won in victory against the Night…Night was exiled for having stooged
for swindlers, and started gathering up its bundles of twilight from the sky… The
shadows conspired to see if they could, at dusk, cause the Sun some affront…Night
had gone out with its black mask to direct the dance of the stars…

Similarly creative metaphors are employed to describe other
phenomena:

…the sea, with a smack of its waves,
beat the rocks that wouldn’t give the answers to the Latin exercises they had
been assigned…she reached the foot of a spoilsport of a mountain that went
around with its head in the clouds just to bother them…the sun holed up in the
clouds from fear, and the sky grew dark; the hearts of all those people were
like mummies, and they were trembling so hard they wouldn’t have been able to
take an enema made of a single pig’s bristle.

Basile’s descriptive passages often employ epic catalogs in which,
regardless of subject, he employs a trademark delight in ribald and earthy
metaphor. For example, in “The Dragon,” an evil, murderous king encounters a
beauty whose

…hair was a set of handcuffs for the
cops of Love, her forehead a tablet on which was written the price list for the
shop of the Graces of amorous pleasures, her eyes two lighthouses that signaled
the vessels of desire to turn their prow toward the port of joys, her mouth a honeycomb
amid two rose hedges.

As if in rude answer to this pleasant vision, in “The Dove,”
a prince is horrified to find that his beautiful beloved’s mother is an ogress,
whose

…hair was like a broom made of dry
branches, not to sweep dust and cobwebs from houses but to blacken and smoke
out hearts; her forehead was made of Genoese stone, to whet the knife of fear
that rips open chests; her eyes were comets that predicted shaky legs, wormy
hearts, frozen spirits, diarrhea of the soul, and evacuation of the intestines,
for she wore terror on her face, fear in her gaze, thunder in her footsteps,
and dysentery in her words. Her mouth was tusked like a pig’s and as big as a
scorpion fish’s, twisted like those who suffer from convulsions, and as drooly
as a mule’s…a distillate of ugliness and a hospital of deformities.

One notable aspect of Basile’s collection that sets it apart
from other fairy tales is the particularity of its Neapolitan setting. Basile’s
stories - and Canepa’s helpful notes - offer fascinating gems of historical
detail about the city in the 16th and early 17th
centuries, a good many of them taken from renowned historian Benedetto Croce’s
edition of The Tale of Tales. There are innumerable references to
Neapolitan customs; to types of dances, songs and games; and in the footnotes,
arresting bits of information. For example, one such note explains that
servants were known as “settepelle” (“seven
breads”) due to servant families being given seven loaves of bread each
Saturday to last them the week. Another describes “The Grotto of the Dogs”
located in the seismically active Phlegraean fields north of Naples, “where
experiments were performed in which animals were made to lose their senses by
inhaling the carbon dioxide of which the cave is full, then plunged into the
waters of the nearby Lake of Agnano to see if they could be revived.” Other
such annotations prick the conscience, such as one describing that a common
custom in Naples for welcoming a newborn child was to spit in its mouth “as a
first sign of recognition and affection,” and another noting a “well-known”
belief that “bathing in a child’s blood will produce offspring to the barren.”

References to food abound, both descriptions of specific
Neapolitan dishes and metaphorical use of foodstuffs, as in “The Three
Citrons,” in which a prince cuts open a magic lemon to reveal “a girl as tender
and white as curd and whey, with a streak of red on her face that made her look
like an Abruzzo ham or a Nola salami…a beauty without measure.” Another
footnote observes that Neapolitans, who at the time had not yet adopted pasta,
were known elsewhere in Italy as “leaf eaters” due to the profusion of vegetable
dishes in the regional cuisine, as underscored in one character’s memorable paean
to the city, which reflects a general civic pride that suffuses the collection:

I cannot remove myself from you without
a stream of tears flowing from my eyes! I cannot leave you, O Mercato, without
a load of grief as merchandise! Beautiful Chiaia, I cannot part company with
you without a thousand wounds tormenting my heart! Farewell, carrots and chard;
farewell, fritters and cakes; farewell, broccoli and pickled tuna; farewell,
tripe and giblets; farewell, stews and casseroles! Farewell, flower of cities,
glory of Italy, painted egg of Europe, mirror of the World! Farewell, Naples,
the non plus ultra where virtue has
set her limits and grace her boundaries! I leave you to become a widower of
your vegetable soups; driven out of this dear village, O my cabbage stalks, I
must leave you behind!

Though Basile’s collection has been issued in a number of
translations, including by British explorer and translator Sir Richard Burton, I found this edition
of Basile’s tales tremendously rewarding. Canepa gives us a richly annotated
work with a thorough, fascinating introduction; references linking the tales to
later variants by other writers; and short synopses prior to each tale that
allow the reader to recall them again with ease (one complaint: it’s
unfortunate that a hardcover version is not available, as this is the kind of
book one is likely to turn to again and again). For readers bothered by the
sanitized, Disney-fied fairy tales that proliferate today, The Tale of Tales
is a resplendently burlesque, marvel-filled antidote by a writer of enormous
talents. Hopefully,a new filmbased on a trio of Basile’s stories will help
bring renewed attention to this exquisite collection.

Friday, August 7, 2015

In an afterward to Divertimento 1889 (published 1975),
Italian author Guido Morselli transparently defines his short novel: “A simple
story with no special significance, and with nothing to teach…a flight from
reality among the phantoms of the Belle Époque? I would not deny it.” But Morselli’s deceptive modesty
here is but one reason the author remained largely in the shadows until after
his suicide in 1973, after which publication of his works brought recognition
that Italy had lost one of its finest writers. As even the title of this
novella suggests, Divertimento 1889 appears to be escapist fiction. This
is not entirely true. Rather, it’s escapist fiction that thematically examines
the very idea of escape, written with a pregnant, tensileevanescence, like a shining
soap bubble maintaining itself longer than one would think possible, and
hinting at ineffable presentiments beyond its blithe, fairy-tale-like gaiety.

As raw material for his tale, Morselli borrows
from the case of King Umberto 1, Savoy ruler of Italy from 1878 to his
assassination in 1900, “An irrelevant figure, as incapable of doing harm as he
was of doing good, as neutral and colourless as the seal embossed on state
notepaper.” As the novel opens, the King sits stuck in his office in Monza,
besieged, like any common bureaucrat, by tedious duties and “far too many
papers, as always,” conscious already of his approaching end:

No mysterious allusions, no dark
presentiments. He is far too sure of his fate. Some fine dramatic death, all
over in a flash? No chance. His destiny is very different, and far worse. This
futile slavish job of his, condemned to trail the length and breadth of his
ungrateful land- dusty, disjointed
Italy - with no power and no responsibilities and yet pursued everywhere by
papers and couriers, as though it all depended on him, as though he could alter
a thing.

Morselli, who wrote an entire allohistorical novel about
World War I, toys here with history on a smaller scale, inventing an episode missing
from the actual accounts of Umberto’s reign: the king, on a whim, trades his
mountains of paper for the mountains of Switzerland, and goes off on a secret
escapade.

Adopting the pseudonym Count Filiberto di Moriana and taking
along a small coterie of trusted advisors, Umberto decamps to the Hotel Adler
in Groeschenen. The sale of one of the King’s landholdings to Frau Von Goltz of
nearby Wassen, aunt to a member of the
King’s entourage, will serve as partial excuse for his presence. “Hunting,”
whereabouts unknown, will serve as partial excuse for his absence.

As the King prepares his adventure, a breeze of independence
wafts through his life: “All these preliminaries, every one of these
preparations and precautions, was his doing and his alone – the King’s.
Unaccustomed to such freedom of action, to exercising such ingenuity, he felt
an inordinate pride in his achievement.” On the train ride over, the heady inexperience
of such liberty makes him nearly ill, but, arriving and settling in, he senses an
invigorating delight in being able to behave like a normal person:

Handing over your money, pocketing the
change, behaving like other people do so enviably every day…He bought stamps,
and postcards which he would never send, chocolate he would never eat because
it was against doctor’s orders, a half-bottle of Kirsch which he presented to
Mancuso, exactly like a real-life tourist who has to count every Swiss franc he
spends.

The next day, walking alone in the alpine countryside, he
stumbles upon Frau Von Goltz’s home and is invited in, causing the King to muse
retrospectively, as though expressing the underlying theme from the many fables
of royalty mingling secretly in society, “I discovered life.”

***

A “simple story with no special significance” - yet problems
arise. As the reader can anticipate, the perils for a monarch of traveling
incognito are legion, particularly in Switzerland, “the spies’ paradise.” These
complications – among others a hitch in the land sale, the threat of an ostentatious
visit by the German Kaiser, indiscreet dalliances, an inquisitive vacationing
journalist – crowd in to give the story new tensions and accentuate the fragile
glory of the King’s caprice. But balancing these tensions - and one of Divertimento
1889’s great attractions - is the way Morselli colors in its simple
outlines with rich and often humorous glimpses of the Belle Époque. Digressions on
the “impeccable Helvetian efficiency” of Swiss railroads, for example, convey
the era’s infatuation with novelty and technology:

For then travel by train was a
thrill which the railways companies fostered by devising ingenious circuitous
routes, spectacular ascents and descents and contortions, fruit of a technology
full of fantasy which, like the opera-house, prized set design and trompe-l’oeil effects purely for their
own sakes.

Similar asides illuminate other aspects of Belle Époque life, such as
the interiors of grand hotels; the period patterns and colors and textures of
materials; vintages of great champagnes and marks of fine cigars; the splendid
and imposing beauty of the Alps and the haplessness of foreign tourists who
visit them:

A variety of spectacles was available
to the village’s summer guests. There was the to-ing and fro-ing of the more
dauntless among them, Anglo-Saxon for the most part, setting off to scale the
glaciers with a tinkling arsenal of crampons, ice-picks, and Alpenstocks, amid
a picturesque retinue of guides and muleteers and porters, and as like as not
returning with broken bones and half frozen to death.

Morselli turns a similarly unsparing, winking eye on Italy
itself:

The French (or French-Swiss, or
Belgians) were bandying impressions of Italy. They had been struck by the sheer
scale of everything in Italy. The variety of police forces (three of them,
rivals yet not competitors, even four according to some calculations), the
number of killings (Italians murder each other without cease, and preferably
without motive), the hordes of unemployed day-laborers in village squares, the
immense and unremitting uproar thanks to which the foreign visitor in Florence,
in Genoa, in Milan, might just as well not waste his time trying to grab any
sleep, day or night. The prodigious quantity of litter and empty bottles
enhancing the natural beauty of the landscape, on the beaches, in the fields,
all over the hills. Further peculiarities: if a train arrives at a station less
than twenty minutes behind schedule; if a letter reaches its destination within
three days of being posted, all who are party to the miracle cross themselves
‘just like we do when a calf is born with two heads’.

These amusing snapshots of a time past, besides being entertaining,
underscore the novella’s surprisingly moving themes around mortality, obscurity,
the nature of freedom, one’s relationship with history. Having escaped the
confines of high office, however temporarily, the King cannot escape being
reminded of his approaching end, not least by the print near his bed in the
Hotel Adler, the Stufenaltar des Mannes,
depicting the stages of life from infancy to decrepitude. Part of the charm and
poignancy of Divertimento 1889, however, comes from its subversive reminder
that death is the most democratic of institutions and from its linking the
King’s fate to the imminent demise of an entire era, a world on the verge of
disappearing, swept up by “the frenetic tempo of modern life, particularly as
embodied in its all-consuming technology, such as the telegraph (and soon we
shall have the telephone), electric lighting, the giddy speed of the railway
train.” The “March of Progress” represents “the twilight hour” for monarchies, “the
long evening shadows….beginning to close in…the climacteric.” As the King
recognizes, a greater threat to him than radicalism or socialism is anachronism.

***

In the last line of the book’s afterword, Morselli counsels readers
to “take this little tale in the spirit of its title. One person at least, I
who wrote it, was diverted.” Make that two people, at least; in fact, I went out of my mind over this book. Beyond simple diversion, Divertimento
1889 offers a near perfect narrative of sparkling and unique charm and an
extraordinary belle echappée that confers
a lingering, nagging weightiness long after one has closed the book’s covers.
We’ve been escaping too into Morselli’s glittering, romanticized past, within which there’s a foreboding
reminder for all of us, whether functionaries or kings, of the ultimate
impossibility of escape, of the number of days “enjoyed and those still to
enjoy…shrinking fast, becoming ever fewer and more precious, to be uncorked and
savoured one by one, minute by minute.”